The Pingtung County Government yesterday said that it is considering filing a lawsuit against Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) over the company’s failure to report an accident on Saturday in which an auxiliary power converter outside a nuclear reactor at the Ma-anshan (馬鞍山) Nuclear Power Plant caught fire.
The county government also called on the Atomic Energy Council to impose a severe punishment on the plant’s administrators for negligence, which it said had threatened public safety.
“Accidents at the Ma-anshan power plant do not affect Taipower alone, they affect all of Pingtung County and all Taiwanese,” county government spokesperson Huang Chien-chia (黃建嘉) told a news conference yesterday.
Photo: Chen Chih-chu, Taipei Times
Plant administrators have contravened Article 23 of the Nuclear Emergency Response Act (核子事故緊急應變法), as they did not inform the county government when the fire broke out and compromised the county government’s ability to gather the information necessary to enforce disaster prevention measures, Huang said.
He said that the county government is considering filing a charge of offenses against public safety against plant administrators.
The county government demanded that the power plant review its reporting mechanism and not allow a similar incident to occur, he said.
Separately yesterday, Democratic Progressive Party legislators Chuang Ruei-hsiung (莊瑞雄) and Su Chen-ching (蘇震清) criticized Taipower for denying them access to maintenance records for the power converter central to the incident, saying that the company might be plotting to conceal facts about the accident.
Chuang told a news conference in Taipei that he was denied the document by a Taipower employee, who told him the file was confidential. He asked Taipower nuclear generation department deputy director Liang Tien-jui (梁天瑞) if there was anything in the file related to Saturday’s accident that is “best left untold,” while calling on the Ministry of Justice’s Agency Against Corruption to investigate possible corruption in Taipower’s facilities procurement.
Su criticized Taipower’s “poor communication,” saying the company informed the county government just one minute before workers extinguished the fire, which reportedly took 17 minutes to get under control.
He said that Taipower has no regard for the lives of Pingtung residents and demanded that the council launch a probe of possible human errors that might have caused the accident.
In response, Liang said that Taipower acquired the power converter in 1983 from Hitachi Ltd, adding that the acquisition of the device involved no corruption.
Liang said the maintenance record Chuang requested is the intellectual property of Hitachi.
He said that legislators are welcome to examine the file on Taipower’s premises, but that it must not be photocopied or distributed.
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